Co-authored paper grapples with ethics of payment for future COVID-19 infection studies

Associate Professor Ubaka Ogbogu, an authority in health law and bioethics at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law, has co-authored a new publication that examines the ethics of paying participants in future COVID-19 human infection challenge studies.

The paper is titled “Promoting Ethical Payment in Human Infection Challenge Studies” and was published in The American Journal of Bioethics. The paper is based on a more extensive report by the group, released in August 2020.

With the potential for future COVID-19 human infection challenge studies, the paper assesses the ethical question of whether participants in these studies should receive payment for their participation.

The paper concludes by laying out a payment worksheet to assist with determining how much reimbursement, compensation or incentives participants should receive.

Ogbogu co-authored the paper with Holly Fernandez Lynch, Thomas C. Darton, Jae Levy, Frank McCormick, Ruth O. Payne, Alvin E. Roth, Akilah Jefferson Shah, Thomas Smiley, and Emily A. Largent.